Embodiments of the inventive subject matter generally relate to the field of computers, and, more particularly, to associating energy consumption of a virtual machine or other task running on a computer.
A significant portion of the operating cost for large data centers and cloud computing environments is related to the energy costs associated with the data center or cloud servers. In such environments, virtual machines may be assigned to run tasks on behalf of a user. The virtual machines are typically assigned to run on one or more cores of a multicore system. A data center or cloud operator may desire to bill a user for the energy consumed by a virtual machine when running on a processor core. However, there is currently no way to directly measure the energy consumed by a processor core. As a result, previous systems have used various models to estimate power consumption of a virtual machine. However, such models typically use performance based values that do not necessarily correlate well with energy consumption.